


Postcards from the Transitive Property Hotel

by Zabbers



Category: The Hour
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-11-14
Updated: 2015-05-01
Packaged: 2018-02-25 07:56:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 3,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2614190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zabbers/pseuds/Zabbers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lix, Randall, and the Transitive Property Gang in alternate universes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Lix x Malcolm, sacrifices.

**Author's Note:**

> Tumblr flashfics, archived for posterity. Chapter titles list prompts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 23 June 2014

There are no gravestones for their absent children, no leafless, empty albums mourning the lives they never led with the loves they wouldn’t ransom. In retrospect, what they recognise in one another isn’t regret, only loneliness, only endless Saturdays spent at the office for fear of the hollowness of home. Lix brings the bottle, and Malcolm brings the glasses, and together in some dim twilight they toast the choices they made and the doors they boarded up long, long before they had to look inside.


	2. Lix/Twelve, dancing

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 23 June 2014

"I’ve never danced, not in this body; It hasn’t got the right centre of balance."

"Don’t be ridiculous, of course it does. And if anyone can teach you to dance, I can, because I taught Randall to dance, and if Randall can dance, darling, then so can you."


	3. Twelve/Jack Harkness, shadows

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 25 June 2014

The memories come flooding in: Bucharest, 1939—a dauntless foreign correspondent as vulnerable and fractured as the lives he’s trying to photograph crashes into Jack’s orbit like a wild-maned, skittish Thoroughbred, bespectacled and fine-boned, artist’s hands compulsively arranging and re-arranging, arranging and re-arranging, and Jack, aware this man has run away from something that he hasn’t left behind recognizes that hell and does his best to slake its flames the only ways he knows how. 

It’s decades, lifetimes later, when he sees the face again, older, much older, with a childishness that wasn’t there before, and a scowl and a fierce, excitable confidence; and the magnificent hair is the same except silver instead of fieldmouse-brown, and the slim fingers are just as delicate as before except maybe the angles are even more prominent under experienced skin, and Jack knows, would recognize that twinkle anywhere and in any body; this just isn’t the same person, but which one is the shadow and which the thing that casts the shadow, he can’t say.

"Doctor?" he asks, and the shade or not-shade, echo or not-echo turns and looks at him through piercing blue eyes undistorted by thick lenses, and the recognition sweeps relief through Jack on the heels of those memories so thoroughly that he feels shame, shame that he would erase Randall Brown so willingly, shame at what feels like a murder by omission (an overexposed negative), shame at the blithe joy with which he obliterates an exquisite human life in favor of the Time Lord who casts the blinding, brighter light.


	4. Twelve/Valeyard, battlestations

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 29 June 2014

He can feel it all too insistently, even in those moments of post-regenerative identity loss, a timeline self that is and wasn’t, will and won’t be, only much closer now, rippling under the surface of potentiality, a menacing promise carried on the gift of new life. If each regeneration brings a different-same man, then a new regeneration cycle is something once more twisted, tight and coiled, with resentment and the death fear woven thicker and thicker in to the chronogenetic matrix. Like it or not, the Valeyard is coming, cold determination to take everything the Doctor has only just begun to recover, everything he will fight to keep this time (every time)—well, then: to battle.


	5. Malcolm/Jamie, sci-fi

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 29 June 2014

"Fucking half-pint smug _bastard_!” Malcolm’s frustration with his smirking lieutenant manifests as a primal cry of fury and uncharacteristic ineloquence.

"Well, technically, no,” Jamie explains calmly, as though _Dr. Malcolm Tucker_ , of all people, needs told to him the semantics of ex nihilo, ex vivo biogenesis.

But that’s what happens when you clone yourself a wee lover out of bits of leftover psychopath.


	6. Malcolm/Jamie, Pacific Rim

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 5 July 2014

It isn’t Tom’s illness—of course it isn’t—or even the backstabbing, backroom campaigns to partner him with appropriate candidates, candidates each faction can control; and it isn’t the endless nights: the war clock counting with an increasingly urgent yet hopeless sense of doom, the black market cheese snuck in with ration packs and left uneaten in claustrophobic, repurposed cupboard-cum-conference rooms, and the stale sour scent of old sweat and anxiety after too many sparring sessions, too much time in simulators and drivesuits; it isn’t even the vicious accusations of betrayal, painfully, purposefully personal and designed to wound more efficiently than any Kaiju, any Kwoon Combat weapon, any shouted, linguistically-charged insult. It isn’t any of that, and it’s all of it, not one reason but a lifetime of reasons, but if pressed, they both know that that was the one night in Shatterdome DOSAC—after that countdown, one day’s ill-fated battle isolated in the merciless Pacific—that breaks them, splits apart this seemingly unfuckable team calling itself Caledonian Mafia.

When Jamie walks out, Malcolm knows exactly why even if he can’t verbalise the specifics or admit to the validity of Jamie’s feelings, and it leaves a rupture, a paralysed half where his left arm used to be; worst of all, it leaves him alone in his dreams, in his memories, alone, as he has never had to be, in the drift.


	7. Twelve and Clara, in a punk rock band

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 7 July 2014

She never thought she’d be a roadie, but she’d always loved the music, and now that the gig is over, she’s at loose ends, loitering about the venue not yet ready to head home, images of tweed and bow ties and light shows still sparkling in her head, when _he_ just appears right in front of her, like it’s some kind of flawless stage magic. The shock of vibrantly dyed hair has given way to silver, and the argyle jumper is now a more restrained (and yet somehow no less flashy) black jacket, but she’s sure it’s him: she’d looked at that album cover often enough growing up, and after her mum died, it had become a sort of token for her, with its pressed-in outline where the Fateful Leaf had been before time had finally caused it to disintegrate away into nothing but the most important of memories.

Clara’s wide-eyed, and he doesn’t seem any less astonished because he stares at her with this pale, blue intensity and these angry-owl eyebrows, and when he opens his mouth what he says, which is “Excuse me, don’t I know you?” is so very much just as surprising as walking into the path of the lead singer of a punk rock band so obscure that only Clara’s parents had ever heard of it, much less owned the (only) album, that before good sense, self-preservation or social convention kicks in, she’s reached up and wrapped her arms around his neck in an impulsive hug like she’s been reunited with a long-lost friend.


	8. Malcolm/Jamie, wings

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 7 July 2014

Jamie’s wings are all steel and silver, a sheaf of blades’ edges that fold and unfold with the clatter of security shutters and the metallic ring of swords, wings saints throw themselves against in zealous ecstasies, wings you hear coming before you see the sunlight reflect blindingly off their surfaces, that tear up every suit jacket and tacky anorak Jamie deigns to shrug over them, face lit up in an unabashed, cheesy, even self-satisfied grin. Jamie’s wings are the sort that show up in icons palpable with the artists’ terror as, driven by the afterimage of divine violence and the echoed wrath of obscene words, they work feverishly to capture, and so exorcise, the angel’s vivid form.

Malcolm’s wings are silent: Malcolm’s wings are the haze from a scalding surface and the mirror you can see through; Malcolm’s wings are invisible until he needs them, and when he needs them they’re invisible still, like a magnetic field, like rapture, and they are never depicted, because they are the nightmares the poets know never to voice, and the hallucinations the painters dare never to depict…because as every opium-fueled visionary knows, by the time you see them, it’s too late, you’re _fucked_.


	9. Randall, Lix, (Dugdale), Utopia

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 11 July 2014

Jessica doesn’t remember much (running until she can’t run any more…Grant, Arby…the killing tree) each time she wakes up in her room, but she remembers the girl in the next cell over, this gaunt-looking thing, eighteen, maybe nineteen, wan as a zoo fox, always watching her with wary blue eyes. She’s grown to expect it, and after a while she finds it comforting, the silent, sharp presence; Jessica keeps time by the way her hair grows out, by tallying how often her nails are cut down to the angry quick, by counting her breaths and matching them as they fall into unwilling sleep. She thinks about laboratories and experiments and hidden codes, and she wonders sometimes if they’re related, and sometimes she knows they aren’t, but there’s inheritance and there’s inheritance, and what is a parent is a creator and whoever she is, she’s here for a reason as much as Jessica is, and that means she must be important, it means she must be for something, doesn’t she?

~

Trying to solve the mysteries that hold hostage what there is left of safety, he finds them in an old file—almost literally: there are background checks and phone tapping transcripts and photographs, circa 1994; he, wild-haired and nearsighted and fierce, she all sharp-angled, sere elegance—and by the time he’s finished the file he feels as though he knows them, their entire defiant, audacious, tragic story. There’s more at stake than ever, now, with Alice to think of, and Michael Dugdale is determined to build something like a return to normalcy for his family, away from the, the paranoid nightmare of death and disease and conspiracy that the others seem to have taken for granted. But the thing is he’s actually a very good civil servant, trained to be an archivist, and very good at finding, records as well as people, and truths too, even when he doesn’t want them, and when what he finds is that he can’t have normality, not ever again, not with Alice, he decides that what he has to do is go looking for the two people who might be able at least to give him some answers, and for whom he might, just, be able to provide the solution to one, to perhaps the most important mystery of all.

~

He could have let her sleep, but then, she had never been asleep, not in all these years a sleeper agent, not really; she had always been driven by a past that pursued her, down the halls of Thames House, up the ranks of the Intelligence and Security Services, whispering the names she’d silenced in her own mind. When he shows up at her office, a scientist turned journalist turned government expert (going on about that business with the Russian Flu “vaccine” and the civil servant Dugdale), she refuses to entertain the subject of the past, but the words simmer below the table like water approaching its triple point, sparking between them at every glance and exchange and narrow passage, so that her very name seems to shift and dissolve itself in his mouth: Ms. Shaw, Miss Storm, _Lix_ … She wants to say Randall, leave me alone; Randall, go away and save yourself; no more, not again, Randall, _please_ ; but then he says the only name that matters, and everything is unmade, and Juliet Shaw becomes Lix Storm again, fighting the fight of a lifetime ago, but this time, not for the world, and not for herself, or even for Randall, but for Sofia.


	10. Twelve and Wrong Jamie meet Lix and Randall in Spain

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 12 July 2014

"You’re pregnant," he says with that strange mixture of artlessness and accusation, and it’s like everything that she’s been holding bound up so carefully inside her heart splits its way out of her, so that she has to cup her palm against her mouth to keep from giving them all away. She tastes solvent and blood and potato dirt, and for a moment she thinks she’s going to be sick, but he takes her hand and she presses their clasped fingers against her belly, and he’s staring at her with those wide, piercing eyes that seem to constantly challenge _everything_ , and she’s terrified, but somehow, knowing this stranger who isn’t a stranger knows, Lix doesn’t feel so alone all of a sudden. 

"Don’t tell Randall, he…I just need some time," and the Doctor nods, and looks across the rubble at his younger doppelgänger, and Lix thinks there is something he won’t say about time, and she wonders how much they have left at all.

~

Jamie MacDonald keeps staring at him with this amused wonderment, always as though on the verge of making some comment, and Randall writhes under the scrutiny, inside; he takes off his glasses and tries to clean them, and does it again, fruitlessly, grease and grit and scratches an inescapable reality of his condition here. 

"They’re going to lose," he says matter-of-factly, and Randall almost laughs, because by now it’s obvious, but Fascism can’t be allowed to march over Europe unopposed, "Franco will fuck Spain for thirty years like the youngest wife in an emperor’s harem; there’ll be scars."

Randall compulsively touches the livid, tender laceration in the spot below his ribs, grateful it’s not a deeper wound, worry about infection always at the corners of conscious thought, slow as it has been to heal; Jamie’s gaze follows, and Randall thinks he sees the fight and struggle not to reach out, before the blithe façade hardens into something more serious and Jamie tears his gaze away to stare back at Lix and at the…other one (what is he? echo? destiny? memento mori?):

“That’s why we had to come.”


	11. Randall x Lix, The Walking Dead

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 2 August 2014

Nineteen years is a long time to search for someone, a long time to journey alone across a wasted continent, long for a life of violence and hardship and sorrow; he was always reckless, and in some way, that saved him, early on, when the world had been newly washed with blood, when the War fallen had walked again, before any of them had learned how to live in this remorseless new reality; in the intervening years he has grown lean and taciturn and difficult, but also cunning and resilient and puissant, and he has taught himself to use his own maladaptations as tools, and to do the same with the flaws of those under his care (in Paris, especially, he had been renowned for the order he had achieved, however briefly). But there is one weakness that has broken him from the prospect of stability and of peace, time and again: now found at last, older, scarred, staring him down across the ruins of what was once an office—windows broken and thick dust as everywhere, but the desk and the ashtray and the typewriter somehow still intact—unhappy defiance a thin line across her face, in those eyes, how she looks at him, what does he look like, so long since he has bothered to seek out his reflection in any but elusive her?

Randall puts the bullet on the edge of Lix’s desk, picks it up again, sets it down in line with the corner and the desk pad and the rusting letter tray, exchanges it for her old rifle, half-familiar from days facing what they thought was the gravest of enemies…she doesn’t stop him, but the defiance flickers; they can read each other as though they’d never been apart…he raises it, looks along the barrel, lowers it, its weight strangely light and half-recognised, and the strap a lash and a binding hanging heavy from his hands; it’s the wrong object but it’s all he has: when he speaks, his voice is hoarse with disuse, “Dust on the sights…”


	12. The Hour, Life on Mars

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 9 August 2014

An expensive, rebellious BBC news programme, run (officially and un-) by two women, neither out of her twenties: it’s hardly surprising that when things go wrong, when blame is to be assigned and punishments meted, at least one of them gets the short end of the stick. Lix isn’t the only one to go into exile—Freddie flees to America—but it’s Lix who heads like a trained pigeon straight into the wellspring of danger, who says what’s happened is simply the impetus she’s needed to grab her camera and put her feet on the ground, where the real reporting is, where she can stop feeling so damned comfortable and _helpless_ ; it’s Lix who gets on a boat with the intention of making Sinai her final port of call, and who disappears _somewhere_ along the way, maybe in Algeria, maybe elsewhere in Africa, the most precise location the authorities are willing to give.

And it’s Lix who is first to break Bel’s heart, when she doesn’t return.

~

Lix Storm is twenty-six years old, and what she remembers of 1937 is not the revolution-swept battleground she’s thrown into, but a cheerful, vaguely celebratory year in which she joined the Brownies like the Little Princesses and was allowed to watch all forty minutes of the Coronation procession while her baby sister stayed behind with Nurse.

Spain in 1937…is something else entirely, but at least it isn’t Morocco, and if she was prepared for Egypt—no, it isn’t Spain Lix isn’t prepared for, it’s this, it’s coming to and being told the CNT has taken over the telephone exchange; it’s being handed a rifle about as old and only half as functional as her grandfather’s and being expected to shoot bullets instead of film; it’s suddenly finding herself embedded in a history of which she missed being a part and not comprehending how it could be possible, much less what role she’s meant to play in it.

Thank God, then, for the fluffy-haired Scottish journalist who, presumably noticing her alarm and panic, comes to her aid, darting across the rubble like an unexpectedly bipedal deer and offering her the very calming succor of a hip flask and the sweetest, most bashful smile she has ever had the fortune to see.


	13. Malcolm/Jamie, running and learning

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 9 April, 2015

There was a time Malcolm thought he knew exactly how power worked, that he _was_ exactly how power worked.

And there was a time he’d thought he was done, finished, through with it all, riding cowered in the back of a taxi, clutching a dignity that was like a hissing, skinny scar-ratty cat struggling in the space under his suit jacket. Running, actually, and for once not towards but away.

There was a time he’d thought he would never see Jamie again.

Then, he had: an older, frightened Jamie sneaking into his house and drawing the blinds, hands shaking as he’d lit his fag and put it to his lips, pupils dilated and eyes too big in his face. On his heels a man with a yellow bag.

That was the time–the beginning of the time–Malcolm learned he’d known nothing, the time he started over, learned it all again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written in Mechelen for bollockingface's postcard exchange.


End file.
